I tried not to let any such judgment show in my face or my words, as Carlos was such a kind soul, and so tireless in teaching me the vast minutia of the used vinyl trade. The color of the label, or the seemingly forbidding appellation “mono,’’ could raise an old record from twenty-five-cent Goodwill castoff to collector’s item worth ten thousand dollars. In my first two months of work I had spotted two such prizes in batches from estate sales, testimony only to my photographic memory of the clues I was given and not to any love of the collecting game.
But to Carlos my mastery of the details was a sign of natural fellowship that put me far more in his graces than the other-workers, who had been there longer but never went beyond their own personal obsessions in music. So he wanted to make me more social, happier in life.
Which undoubtedly involved getting me laid—which had not happened yet, in a general environment where this was rather like not getting wet when it rained.
He wasn’t gross about it, of course, which might have worked. Instead, he pointed the young girls at me, the interesting ones who had somehow developed a taste for forty-year-old items from Moby Grape or the Flying Burrito Brothers or Tom Rapp. More accurately, he aimed them at me like guided missiles.
That night, it was music I was truly interested in. Carlos was roaming about the store, long black hair and raggedy black whiskers in full glory, only the lack of cannon fuses sputtering in his beard keeping him from looking like an illustration from a book about Blackbeard the pirate. Two girls had already glanced at him and then found something interesting well out of his path, but then the girl I had been watching since she came in the store realized that he was the real expert among us.
She had long, thick, straight dark hair, and she was quite tall, but not skinny. Sharp features, pale creamy skin, rimless wire glasses of the kind that barely seem to be there. The eyes behind them were blue, I guessed, but they seemed just bright and indeterminate. She spoke to Carlos very softly and politely, and I could tell that he thought she was an unusually good prospect for me only by the friendly glitter in his eye as he pointed her across the store to me.
I went on filing, completing that small corner of the store that Carlos had decided should be set aside as a shrine to obscure psychedelia. I felt my blood rise as she approached me; I did not look up but rather watched her out of the corner of my eye. I had learned that something in my manner offended some women if they caught me looking at them.
She moved like a cat. I don’t mean that she was slinking or anything like that, rather she moved shyly, but her shyness, like that of the cat, was entirely physical. She was shying away even as she neared me, tacking aside and then returning to her course like a small sailboat.
When she was right before me, I sensed none of the command that you get from so many right-thinking folk, the retrograde urge to treat the employees of a store as if they were slaves. Rather, it was as if she had seen me in the street, carrying some book or record that she just had to ask about, and was trying to think up an excuse to speak to me without seeming too forward.
“Excuse me,’’ she said softly, so softly. “Do you have anything by Pentangle? I heard something on The Thistle & Shamrock—’Willy O’ Winsbury’ I think it was. Great musicians, acoustic guitarists and a woman who sang like an angel—’’
“Jacqui McShee,’’ I said. “That track is on Solomon’s Seal. One of their two Warner albums. Their one shot at the big time, though they still record, a different lineup with the same singer. I have it at my place, but I know the store doesn’t. About fifty dollars if we ever get a copy. Warner lost the tapes, if you can believe that, so it’s only on vinyl. And one German CD, probably just copied it from the album . . .’’
I suddenly became convinced that I was babbling, so I trailed off.
“I just have to have that song,’’ she said. “I need to be able to hear it when I feel like it.’’ She grinned; she didn’t smile, but drew her mouth back hesitantly, as if she were embarrassed by her teeth.
“I could tape it for you,’’ I stuttered, as I flipped pointlessly through the records of so many forgotten pioneers who had blown their one moment of opportunity and inspiration.
“I have a few tapes,’’ she said, and seemed to fumble for a handbag that she did not have. Then she felt at the huge pocket of her long black coat, and grinned again. “When do you get off?’’
I glared around in panic, and Carlos read the moment perfectly, from a third of the way across the store. It was fifteen minutes to closing, but the hours of this business were erratic at best.
“You can go on ahead if you want, Chris,’’ he said, looking in the register and then looking at the other employees as if he just happened to be working out who he needed for closing. “Gerry and I can handle the close.’’
True enough. I was there to buy and file records, and the older fellows always took care of the till, with an out-of-place care they probably learned in the drug trade they abandoned long ago. The girl smiled and walked toward the door, looking back every once in a while to see if I followed. I did, not even remembering to take the backpack in which I stored all the lists I had made for the job and anything that I thought I could not do without.
I suppose it’s still there.
For a moment, outside the door, I followed her like a lost puppy, until I caught myself and stepped up beside her. She told me her name was Karen. We made the smallest of small talk, nothing about the music that had thrown us together, but only about the current topics that were common property. We were at my place before I knew it, walking around the old van that Dad had signed over to me when I left home.
She waited so patiently while I unbolted the door.
In a moment we were in. I went straight to the record rack, as if to deny any other reason she might have had to enter my place. Most of my Pentangle albums were on CD, but Solomon’s Seal I had on vinyl—I had sought it out and bought it even before I went to work at the store, had found it at a Goodwill and hadn’t even known it was a collector’s item. I placed it on the the turntable, and took the cassette tape she offered me.
“It’s blank,’’ she said. “Could I get the whole album?’’
I nodded and started both the record and the tape. It was a forty-five minute tape, long enough for both sides. The futon where I slept was the only place we could both sit, and I was glad that I had folded it up into a couch for some reason that morning. She took off her long black coat before she sat down, and she was wearing a knee-length skirt, that rode up as she sat down, and a delicate white cotton shirt.
It just seemed natural to sit there together quietly, and listen to the great music without talking. I had wondered why she hadn’t explored the apartment in any way and just stayed there near the door. Then I saw the mirror on the door on the far side of the room. I thought that she must be as uncomfortable at seeing herself as I was.
She looked at me far more than I looked at her. She stayed on the futon while I got up at the end of side one, ran the tape to the end before turning it over, and turned the album to the other side. When I sat down, she moved closer to me and smiled, touched my hand. I had a hard time keeping from pulling it away. Her hand was so cool, it made me feel that my own was hot and sweaty.
“Willy O’ Winsbury’’ was the first track on side two. It was the story of a king who had been held captive for many years in Spain, and was overcome by doubt of his daughter’s chastity when he finally returns. He asks why she is so pale.
Karen moved toward me, so slowly.
Have you been sick, he asks. Or have you slept with a man?
She touched my shoulder.
The king orders his daughter to take off her gown, so that he might know whether or not she was still a virgin . . .
To see if she was pregnant? Or did he think loss of virginity changed a woman’s very form?
Karen’s arm was around my shoulder, tentatively, as if not to frighten me, and her other hand touched my chest.
Her hips so r
ound . . .
She kissed me, slowly and thoroughly. I don’t know even now how long it lasted. I grasped her to me—I had none of the skill she showed; I just held her as if she were something afloat in a fatal sea.
I feared acting too soon, being too eager. The kiss alone was too much for me, too much to be believed.
But she was the one who was too eager. Her mouth left mine and worked its way down my chin, down to my neck. She nuzzled there like an abandoned kitten, and I felt the teeth of her lower jaw to the side of my Adam’s apple. Her charming, slightly protruding front teeth.
I opened my eyes and saw the mirror across the room. Her face in the mirror flickered, and would not resolve. My God, I thought, of course I would have a migraine at this time. But then her teeth brushed my neck.
And her fangs.
It didn’t hurt much, the piercing. But suddenly I knew what was happening. I pushed her away and stumbled to my feet. My hand went to my throat, where there were the tiniest cuts. No more than I got when I shaved my too-soft skin.
I ran to the door, then remembered it was my own apartment. I longed to escape, but I thought madly that I was already in the only place I could run to.
Karen was standing now, brushing herself off and trying not to look at me.
I fell to the floor as the song ended, down to my knees. No, that’s the wrong song, I thought madly. The Kinks.
She walked toward me, hesitantly. Still shyly.
She had her coat over her arms. She looked away from me and slid it on. She was breathing so deeply that she could not keep her mouth shut, and I could see her gleaming white fangs, so much whiter than her other teeth, slowly retract into her upper jaw and slowly become regular incisors. Like a viper’s fangs folding up.
“I’m sorry,’’ she said. “I thought everyone wants . . .’’
She was acting as if she had been merely a bit too forward. You were after my life’s blood, I thought madly, you were after my soul . . . everyone wants to lose his soul?.
She stepped carefully around me, not looking at me, as she opened the door and left. She did not close the door, and she ran down the steps to the street.
I might have thought that she would just try to forget me, forget the embarrassing thing that had happened to her, get on with her life—
Her life?
Those two words stuck in my head, and they changed everything. All that went after. All that I could think of was that a vampire knew where I lived.
It took far less time than I would have thought to throw all the indispensable things that I owned into the van. Clothes, the futon, a few books. I even threw the records and all the stereo equipment in there.
It took less time than I would have thought to find another job, another place to live.
It took less time than I would have thought to find her again.
I worked the second shift at an all-night copy shop. The job was easy to learn, easy to perform competently. And I got out every night at midnight, when the undead were just getting to their most serious stalking.
I stopped at the grocery store the day after. At a hardware store. At an odd martial arts place. I had what I needed.
Just in case.
It was about eleven-thirty one night and I was running off a church bulletin when I saw them pass. It was so close to closing, just like the last time, that I could take off a bit early. And follow them.
I had another backpack this time.
Karen had found someone. Good for her.
A charming couple, I thought bitterly. She in her long dark coat, he in his new leather jacket. He was very pale and wore a scarf around his neck. Short dark hair. Only the scarf to get in the way, I thought. I tracked them deep into the city, to the heart of the jungle. There was Goth music booming from a club, their obvious destination.
Karen had been glancing behind her uneasily for quite a while, but she only took a few unexpected turns. The boy’s instincts were not as well formed, and he tramped on innocently until I blatantly kicked a bottle at the mouth of an alley.
He turned and confronted me. He smirked at the image I must have presented, but for the first time in my life I was glad that I was not trying to impress someone in the slightest way.
I let the backpack slide off my shoulder carelessly, as if by accident.
“You following us, creep?’’ he snarled. He smiled, and I saw the newest, cutest baby fangs start to unfold themselves.
I felt the handle of the kukri I had bought at the martial arts store. Made in Nepal. The other trade of the Gurkhas, besides fighting for the British as mercenaries. I whipped it out, giving him only a second to admire the blade that started out from the handle as if it were a normal large knife, maybe a Bowie, and then bent inward about forty-five degrees, the blade of the second half rounded luxuriously to the tip. I had seen someone behead a cow with one in Apocalypse Now—not a faked scene—and the odd clerk at the martial arts store had assured me that it was the best beheading tool ever invented.
The boy drew his breath in, and did not look so confident. The scarf slipped down from his neck, revealing two small scars. That was all I needed to remove my doubts.
The blade seemed alive in my hands.
There was a thud on the pavement, but the body still stood. No life’s blood spurted, but rather, there was a sucking sound, as if the body expressed its longing for blood in its last moment and drew in only air.
The body fell. Karen was standing right behind him. She did not scream, but only began to weep. I heard an odd crinkling sound, and smelled something foul. The body at my feet was hurrying to catch up to the time that had passed since it should rightfully have died.
Karen did not run, but only wept pitifully; she stared into my eyes with blue eyes full of guilt at what she had created and I had destroyed.
There was a commotion in the club, dark forms ran out, and I used them as an excuse to run. A coward I was, not to do the same to poor weeping Karen.
But I made up for it in the following months. She never sought me out and I never saw her again in my haunts. I suppose she fled under cover of night, the darkness hiding her in the few hours it would take a late night bus to carry her to another town.
But there was other, easier prey. Those who had been where I had been that night, and had hesitated as I had not. Had given in to this latest fad. To the desire to walk the night, every night, forever.
I could tell how long each had been a vampire by the state of the body immediately after death. Some looked as if they had died a few days before, others almost turned into dust. The papers carried the story of the mad serial killer who hid his victims for months, and then displayed their wrinkled mummified bodies in staged scenes, making it look as if the victims had just fallen where they had been beheaded. The police did not reveal by what weapon, but I kept my kukri out of sight.
I only began to long for the end of my crusade when Elizabeth joined the late shift at the copy shop.
The shop was so desperate for help that they often allowed me to work on past midnight and into the third shift, all night if I wanted. I could earn a lot in overtime. And dodge my responsibilities as the city’s only Van Helsing. And it was on such a night that I met her.
She was so pale and delicate. So small. Sickly, but in a way that inspired me to the most morbid romanticism. I wanted to protect her, though I could rarely work up the nerve to talk to her. Even her soft blonde hair seemed strawlike sometimes, starved and dry. She explained to the boss that she had lupus, and needed an all-night job to avoid the sun that would eventually kill her. She had worked for the Red Cross and other such charities while she had insurance coverage, but now she needed to work for pay. Part-time, she came on at midnight and left well before dawn.
One evening I walked across the street on my nine o’clock break, and saw her in the health food store across the street. I went in to get a snack and lingered nearby as she talked with the person at the counter, discussing how the eating of meat e
mpowered the sexual aspect of the body—not that she felt female meat-eaters were to blame if they were raped, as some vegetarian extremists held.
Yes, I had my doubts, but she wore a gold cross around her neck, and I had by experiment confirmed the power of holy symbols.
I had just begun to be comfortable with her, was considering asking her out, when the man with the magazine came into the store.
He was the most blatant and indiscreet vampire I had seen yet. Black leather jacket, pale smooth skin. Slick black hair. Too perfect by far.
And as soon as he came in, he latched onto Elizabeth. He explained the job in excruciating detail, how this was the new free weekly in town, and would cover all cultural activities. A bit short on funds, so far, so they needed to print it here. He did not seem to notice or care that she shied away from him, that she was obviously counting the minutes until she could be freed from his presence.
“You know what I want, and what you want,’’ I heard him say at one point, from across the room.
And then the job was explained and done. The magazine sheets he left with the experts in the back room to print and collate and staple. And Elizabeth and I were both free to wait the few hours till dawn.
“I’ll walk you home,’’ I heard him say.
I knew she lived nearby; she left work far later than the last bus, and I knew she did not own a car. I had often worried about such a frail defenseless soul making her way home, and had only hoped that the worst of street life was exhausted and spent by four in the morning.
Her shoulders went limp under the coat she had already put on. She nodded to him, and gathered the handbag that seemed too big a burden for her to carry, and allowed him to follow her out the door.
I left seconds later, grabbing my backpack and not even making sure that the other late-night men had heard my shouted explanation.
I followed, more careful than I had ever been before. Never had I slipped from one doorway to another with greater stealth. I slowly peeked around the corner of the common path that led into a cul-de-sac of quaint old townhouses. Spied the doorway that the two of them had gone into.
Better Off Undead Page 25